goodJobWalrus

There is also a "religious" movement, who believe all kind of crazy things about the universe and evolution. And there are a lot of them (in the US at least)....

Price discrimination is a scientific term in economics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

Duly noted.

If you are naming it "Open Hunt", clearly as a jab at PH, you are giving it more attention than you should, given your mission, IMO.

I used to have that. It was waking me up for the first couple of weeks, and then I got used to it, and slept right through.

But that's like coming into a movie 25 minutes late. No, go to the original link, and click through.

Click on the image repeatedly. It's awesome.

No, it was $10 million in today's dollars (it's in the article), although your point still stands. Still, being able to pay for, and being able to raise about 10 kids under 10 at the same time is not the same.

I haven't had a landline since 2000, so I'm not really up to date with this stuff, but I assumed that what is being referred as a 'land line' today is really a VoIP home phone.

What is a $50 investor?

I would also have a problem with the lack of natural light.

Interestingly, the only ones who demand it seem to be people who do conservation work for the chimps.

> which we torture them

I'm not sure to which extent this is true. From what I read (for example S. Pinker mentions this in his Better Nature..) these days all research on animals needs to be ok-ed by ethics committees, and the types of famous research from the past we read about wouldn't fly today. Pinker mentions explicitly his experience as an undergrad with experiments that involved rat torture and says that would never happen today. I guess people who actually work at labs would know more about this, but it appears that things have changed even for lab rats (even though we still destroy them mercilessly when they become pests to us.

Do you know, were they ever profitable?

Is having blood tests in grocery stores / pharmacies a newish thing in the US, or it existed for a long time? I lived in the US in 2004-2007, and had blood tests regularly, but it would have never occurred to me to go to a grocery store for one.

Yeah, the fact you have to audition for an overpriced room is kind of offputting, too.

Yeah, but that doesn't explain that much. What kind of coal / mobile phone business? Where did he get financing?

If the business is buying a truckful of coal / handful of phones and going around the village selling retail, he could have gotten finances by himself. But many people do that, and never manage to become billionaires.

Or he had access to some serious capital, usually not available to ordinary people. Either way, there is more to explain, how exactly do you go from the tax office to billionaire status.

It will be interesting to see whether (or when) this will be followed by a decrease in obesity rates.

Apart of other replies, there is also no evidence that is any better for than conventionally grown produce.

> Look, you have admitted that rich people (i.e., the people who actually have a choice) prefer country dwellings.

No, I haven't. I am totally disinterested in rich people and what they prefer, but I'm not sure that there are fewer rich people living in cities such as NYC or Shangai than in the country.

> And it is true wherever it is that you live.

Right. Good to know. I'll let you get on with it now.

It is actually fascinating how convinced you are that your worldview must be the prevailing one. Yes, you accept that it is possible for the "specific people" to have different preferences, but no way that these can be anything else but individual quirks of the few, and not embedded in a culture, despite you not knowing anything about the culture in question.

Really, you exhausted all my arguments.

> Someone who is forced to live in a tiny apartment because they can't afford anything better isn't really making a free choice, even if they rationalize it by claiming that it is.

Of course, but I wasn't referring to those people. I was talking about the people who prefer to live in apartments, like, for example, my parents who moved from a house (that was actually in a great location) to an apartment by choice (in a worse location, and some years after that in another apt in a better location). Now they live in a house again (not by choice), but keep their city apartment. And my mom keeps telling me how she hates the house, and can't wait to move back to the city apartment :)

and she even has a housekeeper so it's not like she has to do the whole work around the house by herself. This is why I say it's really deeply culturally embedded. You are not able to step out of your cultural conditioning and imagine that there are people who really truly prefer to live in apartment.

I wasn't referring to rich people. They have a whole different set of requirements. Also, they typically don't have to clean their own mansion, of take care of the pesky chores around the house.

Yeah, I personally don't like this bundling of fun activities and charity. If you want to run a marathon, run a marathon. If you want to give to charities, just give. Don't make a pretence of charity to do what you find fun.

> Why would you want to live in a city center

Well, one reason would be:

> long, shitty commutes

another is that some people prefer urban life.

I bet you'd be surprised to hear that in some countries people actually prefer to live in apartments to houses.When I ask why, they often state the fact that it is much less work to upkeep an apartment, so I guess that would be another reason. I personally understand why would some kid from the midwestern suburbs want to live in nyc, even if it means a much lower standard of living.

But in reality I think it really is purely cultural, people prefer what people like them around them prefer. People in the US were living in the cities as well before the "white flight", so at some point, urban middle class families were also the norm.

Yes, it is definitely a consequence of suburbanization of America.

> The US is over 10 times larger than the UK. Guess what, tons of land leads to different expectations.

I'm not sure it's just that, it's also I think, that Americans find it acceptable to live in suburbs. If everyone tried to live in the city centers (like they do in nyc or SF), small places would also be the norm.

I had a colleague in nyc, who moved with his homemaker wife and 2 children, from Utah where they owned their own home, to nyc to live in a studio. I thought it was a very brave choice.

> No need to turn this into another stereotyping Europe vs US issue

But it is kind of true that Americans are extremely melodramatic about this stuff. 800 sqft house is often referred as a "tiny house" in American media. In the UK (for example) this is an average house size.

I read about those before. As I remember, they managed to breed the aggression out of them pretty quickly, but it's much harder to make them want the company of people, the way dogs do.